let me begin by thanking our vice president, joe biden, for your dedication, joe, to this issue, for bringing so many different voices to the table, because while reducing gun violence is a complicated challenge, protecting our children from harm shouldn't be a divisive one. over the month since the tragedy in newtown, we've heard from so many, and, obviously, none have affected us more than the families of those gorgeous children and their teachers and guardians who were lost. and so we're grateful to all of you for taking the time to be here and recognizing that we honor their memories in part by doing everything we can to prevent this from happening again. but we also heard from some unexpected people. in particular, i started getting a lot of letters from kids. four of them are here today. grant fritz, julia stokes, hena zia, and taja goode. they are pretty representative of some of the messages i got. these are some pretty smart letters from some pretty smart young people. hena, a third grader, you can go ahead and wave, hena, that's you. hena wrote, i feel terrible for the pare